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V O LU M E 2 6 | N U M B E R 4 | FAL L 2 0 1 4
Journal of
APPLIED CORPORATE FINANCE
In This Issue: Are U.S. Companies Underinvesting?
The State of the Public Corporation: Not So Much an Eclipse as an Evolution
Capital Deployment Roundtable:
A Discussion of Corporate Investment and Payout Policy
8
22
Conrad S. Ciccotello, Georgia State University
Panelists: John Briscoe, Bristow; Paul Clancy, Biogen Idec;
Michael Mauboussin, Credit Suisse; Paul Hilal,
Pershing Square Capital Management; Scott Ostfeld,
JANA Partners; Don Chew and John McCormack, Journal of
Applied Corporate Finance.
Moderated by Greg Milano, Fortuna Advisors.
Capital Allocation: Evidence, Analytical Methods, and Assessment Guidance
48
Michael J. Mauboussin and Dan Callahan, Credit Suisse
Bridging the Gap between Interest Rates and Investments
75
Marc Zenner, Evan Junek, and Ram Chivukula, J.P. Morgan
An Unconventional Conglomerateur: Henry Singleton and Teledyne
81
William N. Thorndike, Jr.
The Icahn Manifesto
89
Tobias Carlisle
Off Track: The Disappearance of Tracking Stocks
98
Travis Davidson, Ohio University, and Joel Harper,
Oklahoma State University
The Gap between the Theory and Practice of Corporate Valuation:
Survey of European Experts
106
Are Certain Dividend Increases Predictable? The Effect of Repeated
Dividend Increases on Market Returns
118
Franck Bancel, ESCP Europe-Labex ReFi, and
Usha R. Mittoo, University of Manitoba
David Michayluk, University of Technology, Sydney,
Karyn Neuhauser, Lamar University, and Scott Walker,
University of Technology, Sydney
A Message from the Editor
During my 30-plus years as editor of this
journal, I can’t think of a time when U.S.
public companies were not being widely
criticized for “underinvesting,” for failing to devote enough of today’s profits to
increasing tomorrow’s earnings and value.
American companies were charged with
“short termism” throughout the 1980s,
when article after article in the Harvard
Business Review and strategy and management journals were holding up the
“patience” of Japanese corporate managers
as a model for emulation. In the 1990s, after
hostile takeovers and LBOs were effectively
shut down by regulatory curbs on leveraged transactions, U.S. companies were
assailed for caving to pressure from institutional investors to adopt option-laden
pay packages—packages that were said to
focus management’s attention on the bottom line and little else. And even the recent
rise of China as a world economic power
has served, along with the global financial crisis, as a pretext for chastising the
shortsightedness of U.S. corporate financial management practices. In the popular
mind, Chinese companies have been gaining valuable market share because of their
willingness not just to defer profit, but perhaps to forgo it altogether. And if we want
to regain some of this market share, as critics
of corporate America have not been slow to
suggest, perhaps the U.S. should consider
abandoning its shareholder-centered model
of management and governance.
But in the meantime, the stock returns
of U.S. companies continue to outpace
most of their overseas competitors’ by a
wide margin. As Floyd Norris recently
pointed out in his New York Times column,
the stock returns of U.S. companies during
the 36-year period since 1978 have been
the best in American history. By contrast,
2
the main Japanese stock exchange, the
Nikkei 225, continues to trade well below
half of the peak it reached in 1989. And
as for Chinese companies, their total average annual return—dividends plus stock
price appreciation—to their shareholders
during the roughly 20-year period since
the Shanghai market was reopened on a
large scale in 1993 has averaged close to a
negative 5%.
So, if it’s hard to find signs of U.S. corporate “short termism” in their long-run
stock performance, why revisit the charge
of underinvesting now? How are today’s
criticisms any different from, or more credible than, the perennial claims that U.S.
companies systematically sacrifice their
corporate future to concerns about current profitability?
In the “Capital Deployment Roundtable” that appears near the top of this
issue, Michael Mauboussin, head of Global
Financial Strategies at Credit Suisse, reports
that in 2013 the average corporate return
on invested capital for the largest 1,500
U.S. non-financial public companies
reached its highest level in the last 60 years.
But if corporate efficiency in using capital
is today at record levels, growth in corporate capital investment and assets during
the last ten years has been below average.
As a consequence, U.S. companies are sitting on large stockpiles of cash, even after
payouts in the form of dividends and stock
repurchases that are also near record levels.
This combination of high returns on
capital and large payouts with below-average growth raises the possibility, pointed
out by a number of the roundtable participants, that many companies have been
passing up value-adding growth opportunities in misguided efforts to keep raising
their operating returns. Such efforts are
Journal of Applied Corporate Finance • Volume 26 Number 4
“misguided” in the sense that the goal of
financial management, as business schools
have long taught their students, is to maximize not corporate returns on capital, but
net present values. And the way to do that
is to follow the NPV rule: take all projects
that are expected to earn at least the “cost
of capital,” and walk away from the rest.
According to a number of the panelists,
many U.S. companies when evaluating
new investments appear to be using hurdle
rates that are well above their cost of capital. (In fact, in an article that follows the
roundtable, members of the JP Morgan
corporate finance advisory team report
that the median reported hurdle rate for
S&P 100 companies is 18%—which, at
a time when the 10-year Treasury rates are
not much above 2%, seems stratospheric.)
To the extent this is so, such companies
are likely to be sacrificing valuable opportunities, whether for M&A or “organic
growth.”
In support of this argument, Mauboussin points to suggestive evidence of a
recent shift in the market’s view of corporate growth. During the past three decades,
and thus starting in the 1980s, research
published by academics as well as Credit
Suisse shows a generally negative association
between corporate growth rates in earnings (before interest and taxes) and stock
returns; in other words, the companies
with the best stock market performance
have historically been those with relatively modest growth rates—and that have
presumably focused more on increasing
returns on capital. But in the last five years
or so—roughly the post-crisis period—the
companies that have achieved the highest
stock market returns appear to have made
conscious decisions to reduce their returns
while increasing investment and growth.
Fall 2014
As Mauboussin reflects on this finding,
I’ve spent much of my career criticizing
companies for an excessive focus on growth
and too little attention to returns. But with
our latest report, I now find myself in this
weird situation where I might begin arguing
the opposite… [T]he market may be saying
that it’s no longer high returns on capital,
but rather growth, that is the scarce commodity investors are willing to pay up for.
But if this is indeed evidence of a major
underinvestment problem, many U.S.
companies now seem to be responding to
the market’s signals. For, as Mauboussin and
others observe, U.S. corporate capital spending, particularly on M&A, now appears to
be taking off. And corporate spending on
R&D, despite popular claims to the contrary, has risen steadily in the last 30 years.
As Mauboussin and Dan Callahan point out
in their article that follows the roundtable,
total R&D spending by the largest 1,500
U.S companies has increased from 1.4% of
sales in 1980 to its current level of about
2.3%, an increase that reflects the growing
role in the U.S. economy of R&D-intensive sectors like technology and healthcare.
The second major focus of the roundtable, clearly related to the first, is the
widespread complaint that many U.S.
companies are shortchanging the corporate future by paying out excessive
amounts of their capital to investors as
dividends and stock buybacks. There are
two main versions of this story. In the
more popular one, companies like IBM
are said to be attempting to compensate
for their loss of growth prospects by buying back shares primarily to maintain
their reported EPS. In this account, share
repurchases—and dividends too—are
viewed as corporate admissions of failure
to find promising growth opportunities
and so fulfill their primary social mission
of creating jobs.
The other version of the story—one that
is premised on value maximation and not
full employment as the corporate goal—
focuses partly on the underinvestment
problem. In particular, Greg Milano, the
panel’s moderator, cites his own research that
shows that, at least in recent years, companies with the largest buyback programs also
tend to have below-average stock-price and
operating performance. But Milano’s greatest concern about buybacks appears to be
the growing evidence of a tendency for companies to buy back their shares at the worst
possible time—that is, when their prices
turn out to be close to peak levels. By so
doing, companies could not only find themselves short of capital when opportunities
materialize; but in some ways even worse,
they could effectively be rewarding those
shareholders who choose to sell—the shortterm holders, if you will—at the expense of
those who choose to stay.
But others on the panel are less troubled by this possibility of “transfers of
value” between departing and existing
shareholders. As Mauboussin suggests,
even stock buybacks undertaken when
prices are near their highs are likely to
have net benefits for the economy as a
whole. The inclination of U.S. companies,
sometimes with prodding from activist
investors, to pay out their excess capital
is in most ways a reflection of an effective governance system. And as the two
activist investors on the panel—one representing Pershing Square and the other
Jana Partners—were quick to point out,
such payouts have generally functioned
as a demonstration of U.S. corporate
Journal of Applied Corporate Finance • Volume 26 Number 4
managers’ commitment to investing and
operating with the optimal, or value-maximizing, level of capital—neither too much
nor too little. Getting those decisions right
is the main goal of financial management.
And to judge from our lead article, Conrad Ciccotello’s assessment of “The State
of the Public Corporation,” U.S. companies have done pretty well on this score.
Although there are far fewer publicly traded
U.S. companies today than there were 20
or 30 years ago—as Harvard’s Michael
Jensen suggested there might be in a muchcited Harvard Business Review article in
1989—the companies that have survived
are on the whole larger, more productive,
and more valuable than their predecessors.
And the main reason for this development,
as Ciccotello argues, is a vigorous market
for corporate control in which U.S. public companies are continuously monitored
by what Jensen called “active investors”—a
group that includes other public companies,
private equity firms, and even hedge funds.
What’s more, many readers of the roundtable may be surprised to learn that the
average holding period of Pershing Square
is “four years,” a time horizon considerably
longer than that of most actively managed
U.S. mutual funds. And for those of us still
troubled by the possibility of a large and
persistent U.S. corporate underinvestment
problem, the news that investment by both
private equity firms and hedge funds is on
the rise should actually be reassuring.
The next four issues of this journal will be devoted to the following:
(1) corporate risk management; (2)
sustainability and shareholder value;
(3) activist investors; and (4) German capital markets and corporate
governance. Manuscripts should be sent
to me at [email protected]. —DHC
Fall 2014
3
ADVISORY BOARD
EDITORIAL
Yakov Amihud
New York University
Robert Eccles
Harvard Business School
David Larcker
Stanford University
Charles Smithson
Rutter Associates
Editor-in-Chief
Donald H. Chew, Jr.
Mary Barth
Stanford University
Carl Ferenbach
Berkshire Partners
Martin Leibowitz
Morgan Stanley
Joel M. Stern
Stern Value Management
Associate Editor
John L. McCormack
Amar Bhidé
Tufts University
Kenneth French
Dartmouth College
Donald Lessard
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
G. Bennett Stewart
EVA Dimensions
Design and Production
Mary McBride
Michael Bradley
Duke University
Martin Fridson
Lehmann, Livian, Fridson
Advisors LLC
Richard Brealey
London Business School
Stuart L. Gillan
University of Georgia
Robert Merton
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Stewart Myers
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Michael Brennan
University of California,
Los Angeles
Richard Greco
Filangieri Capital Partners
Robert Bruner
University of Virginia
Trevor Harris
Columbia University
Christopher Culp
University of Chicago
Glenn Hubbard
Columbia University
Howard Davies
Institut d’Études Politiques
de Paris
Michael Jensen
Harvard University
Alan Shapiro
University of Southern
California
Steven Kaplan
University of Chicago
Clifford Smith, Jr.
University of Rochester
Richard Ruback
Harvard Business School
G. William Schwert
University of Rochester
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